The Good in Goodbye
by ViscountessKiera
Summary: The Magic Knights do not return, but they do not regret. Sometimes there's good in 'goodbye'. Oneshot.


_**Note:**_ So I'm sure some people are wondering about Ice and Snow. WELL, I'm l still working on the next chapter but I'll upload this in the meantime. Written last year for the 20th anniversary of Magic Knight Rayearth. Story can be placed after the ending of either the manga or anime, it draws plot points from both. For any of my old readers most of my newer work currently is on AO3 under the pen name VKiera.

* * *

" _Someday you'll see the reason why_

 _Sometimes, yeah, sometimes, there's good in goodbye"_

It'd been nearly twenty years now.

Twenty years since they had last been to Cephiro.

Funny, it somehow didn't feel like it could possibly have been that long ago. Sometimes it felt like it could have been yesterday that they'd been whisked away from the top of Tokyo Tower and landed on the back of a giant flying fish.

Going back the second time had been both a blessing and curse in its own way. They returned to a land they'd come to love and set it on a path to a far brighter future, but in doing so they had to once again leave behind all the people they had come to love there. That last goodbye had been the most difficult of all. It had been a goodbye that was both beautiful and painful and the most heart wrenching thing all at the same time.

The first year was the most difficult, she had often lain awake at night and thought about him, and all of the other friends they'd left behind. Was he well? Did he miss her like she missed him? She had lay there until her bones practically ached with the yearning to see him.

It took Fuu until she was out of high school to stop looking back over her shoulder every time a young man with green hair passed her on the street.

At the time she had still worn his gold ring, nestled close to her heart on a small chain around her neck, much the same way Hikaru had worn her own mirrored pendant. She still had the ring, but now more often than not it sat snugly in her jewelry box. Umi had no such trinkets to carry, but perhaps in the end that'd been a good thing for her.

She was the first one to marry after all.

Umi had met him while attending university, a smart young businessman with amber eyes who was quick to give Umi a run for her money when it came to sharply worded comebacks.

Their relationship ended up being more a dance than a marathon and after six years they'd separated, leaving Umi a single mother of one beautiful little girl. It was difficult for her sometimes, but she'd pushed through with Fuu and Hikaru with her all they way. They were after all the 'best aunties' in the world.

Hikaru had taken up travel, jetting off around the world after she finished high school. If she wasn't backpacking in Kilimanjaro, it was mountain climbing in Tibet, or white water rafting in Colorado. Every time she came back with a dozen stories and plenty of souvenirs for everyone, including her brothers.

Recently she'd taken up talk of slowing down and perhaps helping her older brother run their family dojo, with her two other brothers off on their own adventures he could use the help.

She had not dated at all during that time, much to all of her brothers' relief. Fuu had asked her about it once, about a year after Umi married. The two of them had been sitting together, enjoying a cup of coffee after the redhead had returned from one of her grand adventures.

Hikaru had smiled wistfully at her question and looked away for a moment watching the crowd pass by on the busy sidewalk out the café window. "I go months sometimes, without thinking about him, but you know just the other day I passed someone on the street wearing a blue scarf, it made me think of the color of his eyes."

She took a sip of her drink, enjoying the aroma and pleasant warmth it provided from the early autumn chill. "But that's okay, to think of him, to remember him. I don't want to forget him. He was my first love after all." She'd winked at Fuu with a playful smile, "But right now I'm in no hurry, really, besides I can spoil Umi-chan's little one all I want to as a distraction. That is after she gets here in December."

Turns out Hikaru didn't have to wait too long. Umi had given birth exactly two weeks later and she had ran all the way to the hospital, nearly plowing over a nurse on her way in the door.

A few dozen apologies later, the nurse had asked for the blushing redheads number.

Fuu did not pity the man when it came time to meet Hikaru's family a few months later.

 _ooo_

At the ten year mark of their first meeting at Tokyo Tower the three of them went out and got matching tattoos. They sat for hours and reminisced about their journeys in a way they had not allowed themselves to do since their return.

They laughed, they cried and all the while wondered how their friends were back in Cephiro and contemplated how ten years could change so much and yet leave so much just the same.

When she returned home for the holidays her mother had disapproved of the small green symbol on her ankle, as close a she could remember to Windom's great seal, but she was twenty-four and living on her own and about to finish her studies. Her mother's will no longer held as much sway as it once had.

 _ooo_

Hikaru's first son was born the day after her graduation. Fuu could not help but smile a little when her friend told her the boy's name.

"Eagle."

It was quite adorable how protective Umi's daughter became of her playmate, despite the age difference and her being at the 'eww boys' stage of grade school.

 _ooo_

Life has a funny way of leading you down a different road than you expect it to.

She'd met her husband later that year, while giving a lecture at her old university on computer programming.

He became only the second person in her life to call her an idiot.

He really looked nothing like Ferio, except for maybe when he grinned, but he shared the same tough guy with a heart of marshmallow gold quality that she'd once been so fond of in the Cephirean Prince.

Umi had approved of him right away, giving Fuu a gentle nudge in the ribs the first time she introduced them and asking where she'd been hiding him all this time.

He asked her about the ring once.

She smiled at him, while rolling the gold ring between her fingers, "A first love" she told him, "A long, long time ago, in another world."

He seemed curious, but could probably see the sadness in her eyes and he didn't ask about it again.

They were married the following spring.

 _ooo_

There were a few grey strands now amongst her blond ones.

Umi had flicked her own hair back over her shoulder in her trademark gesture and said they all made thirty look good. If the former Knight of Selece had any grey hairs to show for the years she expertly hid them. Fuu giggled and looked up at the clock on the wall and then back to Umi who was busy combing out her daughter's hair, now as long as Umi's had once been. Hikaru had come bursting in the door a moment later, her youngest son swung on her hip and Eagle running in behind her. "Sorry I'm late, I ran all the way here! So what's the big news Fuu?"

She and Umi exchanged amused glances.

Some things never change.

 _ooo_

Her own son had been born in April the following year.

Everything leading up to his birth had been planned and organized to the ninth degree. If she thought Umi had made for a rather enthusiastic brides maid, she'd been wrong. Umi topped herself with being an overly enthusiastic aunt to be, somehow even more so than Kuu.

Yet even still, she somehow wasn't quite ready when the nurse came in (funny enough Hikaru's husband) and handed her son to her; she'd looked down into eyes that looked just like hers.

 _ooo_

Fuu took a quiet walk in the evening, strolling in a park not far from Tokyo Tower. Her son, now eight, was at home, probably on the floor in their living room playing his newest video game.

Tomorrow would be twenty years.

Their time in Cephiro had been on her mind more often in the last few weeks leading up to the anniversary than it had been in a long time.

She sat down on a park bench that faced the tower; the sun had already sunk below the horizon, the sky was awash with it's fading colors.

She would be meeting with Hikaru and Umi tomorrow, but tonight she had sought out a moment alone. Taking his ring out from her pocket she held it in her palm, running a fingertip around its smooth surface. It'd not taken a scratch or even tarnished the tiniest bit in twenty years. Still as bright and warm as the day it'd been given to her.

Time had been good to all of them really, not just the ring.

Somehow, despite what she had believed when they had returned from Cephiro, she felt like she had ended up exactly where she should to be. Given the choice now, if she could have somehow returned to Cephiro she didn't think she would. Or if she did it would not have been to stay. If she had gotten the life she thought she'd wanted back then she would have lost so much she now couldn't imagine living without.

She could not think of a life without her son, without Saturday morning cartoons and patching up scraped knees with bandages and kisses. She would not want a life without her husband, coming home after a long business trip and sinking down beside her on the sofa and burying his face at her neck in her soft curls with a sigh of relief, happy to be home.

She would not give up this life for anything, not even Cephiro.

She did not regret her time in Cephiro, she did not regret giving a part of her heart to a wild eyed boy at fourteen. The time she shared with him she would not forget; in many ways because of him she'd ended up right where she belonged.

Though in some small way, she was still holding onto him, she was still holding onto someone she had to let go of. That she should have let go of a long time ago.

The park lights began to flick on one by one as darkness settled in so she stood to make her way home. Crossing over a small footbridge she stopped halfway across and looked down into the water of the small stream below. Her reflection stared back at her in the pale moonlit water.

As bad as it was then, as much as it hurt to say goodbye, it had made her stronger and put her on the right path for the life she now knew was the one she was meant to have. That last goodbye had eventually given her so much in return

She stood motionless for a moment and then held out her hand, fingers trembling.

The gold ring caught the moonlight as it slid from her palm and dropped quietly into the water below.

A quiet sigh escaped her as she finally let go.

She stepped back from the edge and continued over the bridge, back home, back to her family, back to the life she had made for herself.

From now on goodbye would no longer haunt her.

Sometimes, there is good in goodbye.


End file.
